I was going to take today off – I built “customer-assembled furniture” yesterday – but when I encountered the following, I knew I’d have to write about it:
Imagine how your life as a woman could be without the influence of feminism -
You grow up with married parents. They stay together through thick and thin and work to keep their marriage harmonious because divorce was never an option.
You have a big tight-knit family with several brothers and sisters.
Your mother and grandmother teach you how to be a great homemaker, and you get married in your late teens or early 20s. You never have to waste any time in college or go into debt for a useless degree.
Your parents and extended family helped you find a great husband who provides for you and your children. Your marriage also lasts a lifetime and divorce is never on the table.
You're head-over-heels in love with your husband because you never became jaded by going through a string of romances and heartbreaks before you met him. Your parents taught you to date with purpose and find someone who was compatible by asking the right questions before getting emotionally attached, and taught you to save sex for marriage so you never got used by men who didn't want to marry you.
All the women in your family are also housewives and the older women visit you often and help you with your children and housework, so you're never overwhelmed with motherhood when your children are young.
All the women in your neighborhood are housewives too, so you're friends with many of the women in your neighborhood and get together with their families often.
None of the kids in your family ever step foot in a daycare center or public school. You have an unbreakable bond with your parents, grandparents, and children.
No one in your family ever steps foot in a nursing home because everyone is taken care of by family in their older years.
Please think about it for a minute or two. Then come back here.
The sexual revolution was the only one known to history in which everyone lost.
Time was, I thought it contained a healthful element: a liberation of sorts. Even today, I’m unable to disavow that idea completely. But it went badly wrong. Our posterity had better study it and learn from it.
It wasn’t just one thing, either. There were a lot of flaws in the ideas of the Sixties and early Seventies. They flowed together and became a huge wave that’s crashed down upon us. What we styled “liberation” became the casting-off of all restraint, including the restraints of humility and good sense. They were slowed by the AIDS panic of the late Seventies and Eighties, but when it became clear that AIDS was pretty much a disease of homosexuals and intravenous drug users, they came roaring back at full speed.
We ruined ourselves for one another. We became untrustworthy, calculators and sensualists with little regard for what our forebears had learned from theirs. What better things we had within us, we cast out as impediments to the pursuit of pleasure.
We ruined ourselves. Then we went on to ruin our children.
I’m glad you can’t see me just now.
Strange things have come about because of our heedlessness and crudity. I could go into gruesome details, but I’m not up to that this morning. Consider yourself spared a litany of a sort you’ve seen from me before. (Feel free to thank the customer-assembled furniture I spent yesterday assembling.) But I will mention one thing that’s become unpleasantly obvious, to me at least.
Very young women on social media are actively pursuing much older men. That includes men in their sixties and seventies. Men who are firmly married. Yes, men like me.
This was almost unknown two or three decades ago. It’s not completely unprecedented – there have always been fortune hunters among both sexes – but they were both uncommon and disdained. To compound the ironies, these young women seem largely uninterested in money or status. They want old men because… drum roll, please… we’re old!
No doubt some of my coevals preen themselves over this new phenomenon. Some probably exploit those young women as shamelessly as any young rake. But when the face in the mirror looks like something that sleeps under a bridge and the body beneath it makes the numbers on the bathroom scale spin like the wheels of a slot machine, complete with jackpot bells, you can’t kid yourself.
So why? What makes us their preferred targets?
There’s a known, well understood tendency among older men to idealize “the good old days.” For most of us, what we’re lamenting is our lost youth and what it enabled us to do. But some of today’s laments have another genesis. They’re for times when things were simpler, when we could believe that we had some grasp of “how things work.” And while that, too, might be an idealization, it’s surely something men of all ages would value.
The typical man of middle to late years can’t fool himself that he knows “how things work.” He’s had all such pretensions beaten out of him. (That process kills some, embitters others, and turns still others into curmudgeons.) In particular, he’s aware that he doesn’t grasp contemporary relations between the sexes. But just four or five decades ago…
Never mind. I know how tiresome this sort of thing can get. Besides, I have some sprucing-up to do. I have a lunch date! It’s a young woman who just moved to Long Island. She wants to talk to me about what life was like in the Sixties. It’s as good a reason to get out of the house as any, don’t you think?
Have a nice day.
No comments:
Post a Comment